I'm doing a fresh install on my laptop and ran into this issue, and knowing the fix unmerged mktemp, updated coreutils. Now I can't do a clean shutdown of my system and RC fails after starting 3 services because "/sbin/mktemp" cannot be found. I've done an "#emerge -uDN world" three times just to make sure I have the correct version of coreutils, and nothing. Hrm, would a #revdep-rebuild fix this?

I'm doing a fresh install on my laptop and ran into this issue, and knowing the fix unmerged mktemp, updated coreutils. Now I can't do a clean shutdown of my system and RC fails after starting 3 services because "/sbin/mktemp" cannot be found. I've done an "#emerge -uDN world" three times just to make sure I have the correct version of coreutils, and nothing. Hrm, would a #revdep-rebuild fix this?

I had the same problem when I decided that I could resolve the problem by just masking the coreutils version which clashed. Then everything updated fine with only one problem: my system would not finish the reboot. That is it would finalize all processes and running daemons but the actual power-off would not happen. Then searching for a sollution to this problem I came across this post and unmerged mktemp still having the old coreutils (<sys-apps/coreutils-6.10) which resulted in the exact situation as yours. So I updated my coreutils to the correct version (>=sys-apps/coreutils-6.10) and everything was OK. My guess would be that you should do a emerge --sync to get the correct version of coreutils.